Twenty Years Later, Dan Quayle's Words Seem Less Controversial than Prophetic

Defenders of the single-mother revolution often describe it as empowering for women, who can now free themselves from unhappy unions and live independent lives. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that it has been an economic catastrophe for those women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. Census puts only 8.8 percent of them in that category, up from 6.7 percent since the start of the Great Recession. But over 40 percent of single-mother families are poor, up from 37 percent before the downturn. In the bottom quintile of earnings, most households are single people, many of them elderly. But of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83 percent are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institute’s Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.

Well, comes the response, maybe single mothers are hard up not because they lack husbands but because unskilled, low-earning women are likelier to become single mothers in the first place. The Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered “shotgun” unions—that is, getting married after getting pregnant—on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn’t marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones. “Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty,” Lerman concluded, “marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant.” In another study, Sawhill and Adam Thomas ran an experiment simulating marriages between poor single mothers and unattached men with similar characteristics. Even though the men might have incomes lower than the average married father’s, the researchers found, the new “marriages” would mean a 65.4 percent decline in the number of poor children among the families in the study and a 43.2 percent rise in per-capita income.

You might think that cohabiting mothers would have the same economic advantages as married mothers. You’d be wrong. About half of all unmarried mothers in the United States are living with the child’s father at the time of birth, and they do tend to be less poor than lone mothers—at first. But cohabiting relationships here, unlike those in Europe, have short shelf lives. According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which examined couples in large American cities in the 1990s, about half of cohabiting couples split before their child was five—compared with just 18 percent of married couples. Cohabiters were also likelier to import instability and economic stress into new relationships. A full 60 percent of cohabiters—but only 21 percent of low-income married couples—already had children from earlier relationships.

Women and their children weren’t the only ones to suffer the economic consequences of the single-mother revolution; low-earning men have lost ground, too.